Jack Mortlock and Big Game Hunting in Queensland in the 1930s and ’40s
Author: Penny Edmonds
On the wall of the Smoking Room at Martindale Hall is the mounted skull of a female dugong, shattered but later repaired. It belonged to a dugong shot by J. T. (Jack) Mortlock’s chauffeur and travelling companion, Jeff Thrum, during their hunting trip to Queensland in August 1937. In the black-and-white photograph below, Thrum sits with a gun in hand on the side of the boat named Warrior. The caption reads ‘With Les Thompson, and showing harpoon gun’. The large dugong is dead on the sand. Jack noted in his diary of 13 August 1937, ‘Thrum secured a female dugong with harpoon gun but did not use the new line holder.’ The photograph of this moment is one of several snapshots of the hunting trip to Island Head Creek, north of Rockhampton, off the coast of central Queensland.
Mortlock was an enthusiastic and active hunter, and the photograph notes that the large dugong was ‘a female 10 1/2 feet long, and 9 feet in girth … its tail measured 3 feet, 6 inches from tip to tip’. Mortlock was keen to test his new ‘Norwegian harpoon gun’. He had taken a hunting trip to Queensland the previous year, in 1936, and had lamented not getting close enough to a dugong to try out the new weapon. On this trip they caught ‘a tiger shark, benito, sweet lips (fish), a parrot fish, mackerel and red emperor. We also caught, cooked and ate a sea turtle. I did not care for that very much’. Keen to shoot anything in sight, Mortlock noted that later on Fairfax Island, which had a population of wild goats, he ‘bagged eight … to thin out some of the superfluous “billies”’.1
Later in 1937 Mortlock wrote an article for the Adelaide Chronicle, titled ‘Killing a Dugong with a Harpoon Rifle: South Australian Sportsmen in Tropical Queensland’, which celebrated his hunting expedition.2
He made special note of the weapon that killed the dugong, writing that he used a ‘Norwegian harpoon gun fired from the shoulder and weighing about 15lbs’. He continued, ‘So tough and thick is the dugong’s head that the three bullets which struck it glanced off it with our doing any damage.’ He recalled that the force of the two bullets shattered the dugong’s head, and so it was ‘spoilt’ and ‘no good as a trophy’.3 Mortlock also wrote that on this trip they were ‘weatherbound’ for quite a while and to relieve the boredom, they ‘went on shore to bag a wild pig … [but] we could find little sport, the weather was too rough’.
“So tough and thick is the dugong’s head that the three bullets which struck it glanced off it without doing any damage.”
Mortlock modelled himself as a gentleman and sportsman-hunter. At this time in South Australia, many wealthy pastoralists held hunting parties and enjoyed shooting as a European pastime, and, by the late nineteenth century, hunted both native and introduced animals and birds. Hunting was an integral part of the British Empire, and in new settler colonies a particular form of imperial masculinity was fashioned around hunting available big (or small) native animals, such as kangaroos.
Edmund Bowman, who built Martindale Hall in 1879-1880, was a member of the Adelaide Hunt Club. The Bowman brothers were keen shooters and by 1881 Edmund had a pack of hounds at Martindale, where the Hunt Club was regularly invited to visit.
Many wealthy pastoralists held hunting parties and enjoyed shooting. Hunting was an integral part of the British Empire, and in new settler colonies, a particular form of imperial masculinity was fashioned around hunting native animals such as kangaroos.
W. T. Mortlock purchased the property in 1891 and continued to host the Hunt Club at Martindale. Mortlock owned extensive property on the Eyre Peninsula, and a photograph of him at his Yalluna property around 1900 shows shark jaws and dolphin skulls and other such trophies hanging on the walls. While his son, Jack, was not a member of the Hunt Club, he was obsessed by hunting, shooting and fishing, keeping a tally of his kills in his diary. He hunted at Martindale and on his west-coast properties. Between 1934 and 1944 he shot 11,545 creatures, including 100 kangaroos, 50 foxes, 7663 rabbits, 2 eagles, 476 shags, 373 parrots, 44 water hen, 9 seals and a shark. On a day’s fishing near Coffin Bay he would often shoot a few shags or seagulls. Jeff Thrum specially modified a Ford Utility in 1938 so that night shooting—that is, spotlighting—would be easier. His guns hung in pride of place in the Smoking Room until his death.
The dugong, or ‘sea cow’, is a marine mammal that lives on sea grass and is one of four living species of the order Sirenia, which also includes three species of manatees. Europeans began hunting dugong in Australia during the 1850s, and the dugong became a much sought-after source of oil and meat. A tourist industry also developed based around hunting dugong, as well as buffalo, crocodile and large fish such as marlin in Queensland and Far North Queensland by the late nineteenth century.
By the 1930s the tropical north had become a magnet for big game hunters around the world, and the safari was a well-known event characterised by a mix of danger and opulence. Popularised by American President Theodore (Teddy) Roosevelt and later by American writer Ernest Hemingway, it had become a commodified adventure involving large and dangerous prey, and considerable luxury. ‘By this time the Australian safari was billed as an “Africa on your own front doorstep”,’ writes historian Claire Brennan. Many Australians and international hunters came to imagine the tropical north as a place of safari in an ‘alluring, exciting and exotic vision’ of Queensland.4
“By this time the Australian safari was billed as an ‘Africa on your own front doorstep’,” writes historian Claire Brennan.
In Queensland, Mortlock chartered the boat Warrior from the owner and guide, Leslie Thompson. Thompson was from Amity Point, Stradbroke Island, near Brisbane, and was a member of an extended Aboriginal and Australian South Sea Islander family who hunted dugongs and took chartered boats out for tourists.5 Many Aboriginal and South Sea Islander families worked in the dugong-oil industry during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Today dugong hunting is restricted. The dugong is considered a vulnerable species and is now protected throughout Australia, although in some areas Indigenous hunting is permitted for food and cultural reasons.
Footnotes
- ‘Back From the Barrier Reef’, Adelaide Chronicle, 6 August 1936, 66. ↩︎
- J. T. Mortlock, ‘Killing a Dugong with a Harpoon Rifle: South Australian Sportsmen in Tropical Queensland’, Adelaide Chronicle, 16 December 1937. ↩︎
- Adelaide Chronicle, 16 December 1937. ↩︎
- Claire Brennan, ‘“An Africa on Your Own Front Door Step”: The Development of an Australian Safari’, Journal of Australian Studies 39, no. 3 (2015): 396–410. ↩︎
- ‘Photograph of the Sons of “Tinker” Campbell & Family, Amity Point’, eHive, 2024, https://ehive.com/collections/4500/objects/841776/photograph-of-the-sons-of-tinker-campbell-family-amity-point-2. ↩︎